Griffith named Fort Valley State U president

NEW YORK (June 27)—Caribbean-American academic Dr. Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith, presently provost and senior vice president at York College of the City University of New York (CUNY), is to be the ninth president of Georgia's Fort Valley State University.

He will assume his new post on July 22 , according to “Dink” NeSmith, the chair of Georgia's University System Board of Regents, who explains, “Dr. Griffith was an outstanding candidate. He has this board’s full support to provide the leadership Fort Valley State University needs at this moment. We are excited about his presidency and delighted he will become the university’s next president. This is a great day for Fort Valley.”

Griffith has been provost at York College since 2007, where he has increased the number of full-time faculty by 30 percent and reorganized the academic division.

Before becoming provost at York College, Griffith, in addition to teaching as a tenured professor of political science, was provost at Radford University in Virginia. He was budget dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Florida International University in Miami, as well as dean of its Honors College.

A specialist on Caribbean security, drugs and crime, he has been a consultant to Canada’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the United States Agency for International Development and other organizations, and he has testified before the United States Congress on Caribbean security matters.

A past president of the Caribbean Studies Association, he has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, the Royal Military College of Canada and the George Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany.

He also has spoken at military academies across the United States and in the Caribbean and serves on the editorial board of the journal Security and Defense Studies Review, in Washington, D.C.

Griffith has published seven books and more than 50 articles on his area of expertise. He earned a Bachelor of Social Science degree from the University of Guyana, a master's in political science and public administration from Long Island University, New York, and both a master of philosophy and doctorate in political science from CUNY. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Educational Leadership Program.

Meanwhile, CUNY’s board of trustees this week appointed a nationally prominent educator, Dr. Rudolph Crew, Oregon’s chief education officer, former New York City schools chancellor and Miami-Dade school superintendent, as president of Medgar Evers College.

Medgar Evers College, with a strong Caribbean student body, is a growing school with some 7,000 students. Offering both associate and baccalaureate degrees, at its founding, it was named for the civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1963 with the hope that “his ideals will inspire students and faculty … in their pursuit of truth as the surest path to human freedom and social justice.”